the direction of two young women at the next table. âTheyâre lovely, arenât they? I wouldnât mind one for supper. Two, in fact. Do you know, Michael, Iâm fifty-six, but I still like a feed now and then.â His lean features, suntanned and clean-shaven, wrinkled into anxiety when he saw my umbrella hooked onto the chair. âWhere did you get that gamp?â
âOh, I just picked it up.â
The sight of it worried him. âI donât like it.â
âYou can lump it, then. Itâs mine, and Iâm very fond of it. Iâll love it till my dying day. Uncle Randolph used to go to Ascot with it before the War.â
âNicked it, eh? Looks fishy to me. Anyway, do you want to hear my story or donât you? I know you do, and itâs good of you to answer my call so quickly. Michael will always stand by a friend in need, I said. Heâs a good six-footer who not only looks after himself in a tight corner, but never lets an old pal down. I didnât have firmer friends in the Sherwood Foresters. I donât like the look of that umbrella, though. Where did you get it from?â
I told him.
âThatâs hardly calculated to set my mind at rest. It looks very suspicious.â He scraped the last stains of custard from all three dishes. âTimes have changed, Michael. You canât be too careful these days. Ten years ago things were comparatively civilised. If you strayed from the straight and narrow all you might end up with was a nasty scar on the lee side of your clock, but nowadays you might get chopped into bits and sprinkled over a Thames bridge from a plastic bag. You vanish without trace. The seagulls gulp every morsel. London pigeons are starting to eat flesh. A few months ago I happened to be the unwilling witness of a fight between the Green Toe Gang and Moggerhangerâs Angels, and as a set-to it made the Battle of Bosworth Field look like a pub brawl at the Elephant and Castle. Things have altered, right enough.â
He plucked the small feather out of his hatband and put it into his mouth. âYouâve been away, so you donât know how things are. How could you?â He spat the bedraggled feather onto a plastic pie plate. âWell, itâs not too bad, either, because otherwise I wouldnât have asked you to come down here and see me, would I?â
âWouldnât you? Listen, Iâll go right off my bonce if you donât tell me why you asked me to leave my cosily furnished railway station on such a foul day.â
Raindrops were running down the window. They broke out in separate places and made a dash for it, as I should have done, increasing in force and strength, born from stationary globules on the way down, like a crowd gathering on the way to a riot. Sometimes they travelled horizontally, lonely figures going a long way, till thwarted by the end of the glass.
âIâll tell you why Iâm here, Michael, and why youâre here. I want your advice and support. A few months ago I was at a loose end. My girlfriend had left me, my mother had died, and I was running out of cash. Iâd earned fifty thousand pounds bringing back a consignment of donât-ask-what from Kashmir. I carried it in the false bottom of a butterfly collection, and got through the customs a treat. I had a beard (grey, unfortunately), little pebbledash glasses and a bush hat. I looked so theatrical they never thought I could be putting on an act. My false passport, fixed up by the Green Toe Gang, said I was a lepidopterist. I even had forged documents from the British Museum of Natural History. When those lads of the Green Toe Gang do something, they do it properly. No flies on them, Michael. No flies, no files, as they say. There arenât any marks where theyâve been, either, not like on the rest of us.
âIt was the best job I ever pulled. Remember when we was smuggling gold ten years ago for Jack Leningrad